#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Today I am on my way to speak, and teach a TV writing seminar, at the 94th Annual Missouri Writer's Guild Conference in Cape Girardeau over the weekend. I have never been to Missouri, so I am looking forward to it. I don't know if I'll have a chance to blog from there or not.
I recently attended a Writers Guild seminar on international opportunties for writers. The basic message was that writers need to start thinking globally if they want to survive in this business. I have been thinking globally for a while now…especially after spending much of 2007 working abroad (writing and producing the action movie FAST TRACK, among other things). It also helps that I've been married to a French woman for nineteen years…France feels like my second home and I am pretty comfortable in Europe.
You may have noticed that I haven't talked much here lately about my TV and screen work. That's because I don't feel comfortable talking about projects that are in development and not yet a certainty. But since CrimeSpree broke the news about me scripting the movie version of GUN MONKEYS, I've been getting a lot of emails asking about me about the project.
I had two panels on the last day of Left Coast Crime…one was hosting a mystery trivia contest in which my friend Robin Burcell was stumped by a two-part question in which the correct answers were "Robin Burcell" and the name of the lead character of her first book. Maybe she was just sunburned, tired, or hung over…or the question was badly worded. To be fair, I was so relaxed after a week in Hawaii that I probably would have missed a question in which I was the correct answer, too. But it was very funny nonetheless.
The best part for me of Tuesday's Left Coast Crime conference activities occurred in the evening. First I screened an episode of MONK and answered questions for the audience. It's rare that I get to see one of my episodes with an audience larger than my wife and the family dog (and they both usually sleep through everything I write on TV). I then spent a few hours on the patio chatting with my wife, my daughter, and my friends Barry Eisler, Robin Burcell, Jan Burke, and Twist Phelan. We talked about everything from dating to booksignings. It was great fun.
The sun finally came out in full force on Wednesday morning. I started the day as toastmaster for the brunch and awards banquet, which I hope was as much fun for the audience as it was for me. The conference isn't over yet, but I can safely say that Bill and Toby Gottfried have pulled off another successful Left Coast Crimes. They announced that the next Left Coast Crime will be in Los Angeles and then Sacramento in 2011.
After the awards, my family and I played hookey from the conference to swim, snorkel, and do some sight-seeing, returning in time for an all-author signing at five. We ended the day by going out to dinner with authors Jonathan Hayes, Jason Starr, and Michelle Gagnon. That was a lot of fun, too.
Tomorrow I have two more panels and then I'm going to try to sneak to the beach to burn the few spots on my body that aren't already charred.
UPDATE: Rhys Bowen reports on the awards brunch and yesterday's conference events for the St. Martin's Press blog.
It's been cloudy and rainy for the first three days of Left Coast Crime 2009 here on the Big Island of Hawaii, but it hasn't dimmed the enthusiasm of the attendees. Bill & Toby Gottfried have always delivered great conventions and I am pleased to report that LCC 2009 is no exception.
I haven't attended many panels (besides my own) but I've enjoyed chatting with readers and authors, something the layout of the vast, open lobby encourages with many comfortable sitting areas where you can feel the warm ocean breeze (without getting soaked by the rain). On the first night, I spent a few hours chatting at a table with authors Robin Burcell, Tim Maleeny, and Jonathan Hayes…and as time went on, our number grew to include Twist Phelan, Barry Eisler, Rhys Bowen and Meg Chittenden (by then we'd moved down to the poolside bar). I'd never met Jonathan before — he's a Senior Medical Examiner in Manhattan and wrote a serial killer novel called PRECIOUS BLOOD. You'd think he'd be a dark and brooding fellow, but he's quite the opposite…charming, funny, and a terrific storyteller. I'm going to have to read his books now.
Twist told me that she and author Jan Burke got lost on their way to see the volcano, which was probably a good thing, because Denise Hamilton and her family also headed there and got so bogged down in heavy rain, that they gave up and camped out at a hotel in Hilo for the night instead.
Yesterday I sat in on a readers group that was discussing one of my DIAGNOSIS MURDER novels and that as great fun for me. I was also on a panel about humorous mysteries and my fellow panelist Parnell Hall had the audience howling with embarrassed laughter as he described his battle with an auto-flushing toilet in a New York airport. We only discuss lofty writerly issues at these conferences.
I have no silly questions to share with you today or salacious gossip…but i'm working on it.
(pictured on the right…Meg Chittenden, me, Rhys Bowen and Robin Burcell).
As you read this, I am on my way to Hawaii with my family to attend Left Coast Crime 2009, where I will be serving a toastmaster and speaking on several panels. Fun, sun, and mystery novels. It doesn't get any better than that. Paradise in Paradise. I am truly a lucky man.
I have to thank my publishers, Penguin, for donating copies of "Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii" for the attendees…and the USA Network for sponsoring the book-bags that everybody will be toting.
Gary Mugford at Mugshots gives MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE a thumbs-up. He says, in part:
Goldberg has lots of fun at the expense of the typical SF convention-goer, but there seems be a respect deep down. […]But it’s really almost an Ambrose book. It’s Ambrose who provides the needed insight into the TV series, since he’s an expert on the show. It’s little insights into Ambrose that makes this something different rather than the same old, same old. That’s why this book gets a thumbs up. Goldberg continues to expand the tight little world that is Adrian Monk. As we head to the eighth and final TV season, it’s going to get harder and harder to find new sides to the mystery that is Monk. But for the time being, Goldberg continues to deliver solid entertainment in new and surprising ways.
Thanks, Gary!
Here's a blast-from-the-past that I stumbled on tonight… Tod and I interviewing each other for Beatrice.com back in 2005.
Tod: How is it that we both grew up in the same house and yet we both write such dramatically different things? People always ask me if I see similarities in our work, but I rarely do, other than that we are prodigious killers of fictional people and that we’ve both set novels in the same exact place (Loon Lake, WA). Why do you think we write such different kinds of books?
Lee: I’m still trying to figure out the Loon Lake thing. It’s like our family’s collective unconscious (our uncle also set part of his novel at Loon Lake). You don’t know this, but I also have fifty pages of a torrid, James M. Cain-esque novel set at Loon Lake that I started writing three or four years ago and never finished. Before I gave up on it, I scrawled the key plot points on a napkin in case I ever wanted to get back to it. It was as if I knew I was going to abandon it even before I did. Well, I didn’t entirely abandon it. I think about it every few months and I lifted a paragraph or two from it for The Man With the Iron-On Badge, so those fifty pages weren’t a complete waste.
But to answer your question, we write different books because we are different people. Given a choice between reading a literary novel or a thriller, I’ll choose the thriller most of the time. You’ll choose the literary fiction. That’s not to say I don’t read non-crime/non-genre novels…I do. We share some of the same favorite authors. But I love thrillers, mysteries, and westerns—basically, escapist fiction—with a passion that you clearly do not.
Maybe it has to do with TV. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but I also grew up watching a lot more TV than you did and developing a true love of the four-act structure. Maybe watching all that TV shaped what I expect from a story…a kind of narrative engine, conflict, and personal stakes that aren’t always found in literary fiction. Or I’m just superficial.
As it turns out, I pulled out that napkin the other day and am actually thinking about tackling that book now.
I finished writing my latest MONK novel the other day and I felt like lazing around. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately and after writing a book I didn’t feel much like reading one. So I vegged out on television…some new, some old.
